I'd like to know how other businesses manage documents within or outside an enterprise social collaboration tool. This is an area we are struggling with and has already crippled performance on our enterprise portal and wiki environment. I don't want the same thing happening if we roll out a social collaboration solution. I also don't want this platform to be a dumping ground for documents. Iv'e heard others that accomplish this through policies and file size limitations. I would ultimately like to find a more elegant solution (e.g. one button publish from clearspace to a backend doc management tool).

First of all, Documentum (a top-shelf enterprise content management platform) is an EMC product. Not surprisingly, we have a corporate deployment with all of our content in it.

As part of our social environment, we can expose enterprise content with links, etc. What we really want to do is capture social interaction as content that can be corporately managed, something we can't do quite yet.

Stepping back a bit, I have come to the conclusion that having some sort of content/document management capability is an essential requirement to really push internal social media collaboration. You've got to be able to expose corporate content in a meaningful and in-context way, and ideally capture wikis et. al. as corporate content.

I have no answer to this, but I think that one of the overlooked aspects of Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration systems / whatever you want to call them is the problem of how you moved informal unstructured content into a formal document management system.

For example, a wiki can be a great way for people to collaborate and co-author / review a sales proposal. But at some point it needs to be put into a Word / Pages document and formatted. The final document then needs to be reviewed but as a document, not as a web page.

I haven't really seen anything that addresses this yet, unless someone can point me somewhere?

I was tasked with soliving this issue at my organization, and to-date still have not found a good solution. Because quality documentation is produced in a highly collaborative environment, I have been experimenting with Clearspace. Unfortuantely, I have found a great deal of limitations when it comes to creating taxonomy and document standardization. I feel as though standardized documentation needs a great deal of structure to ensure consistency, searchability and re-usability... something that is very difficult to enforce in the midst of social media's "controlled chaos." Does anyone have any examples of taking collaboration to standardized documentation out in the wild?

It sounds like the Documentum integration would be a perfect fit for the new Content Type Framework in Jive SBS 3.0. By creating a custom content type, you can easily hook in to search, tagging, bookmarking and more with very little development effort.

I recently blogged about my own experiences of using the framework to implement a new environment tracking feature in our customer support portal. Using this framework reduced my development time from several months down to a few weeks AND it was all done inside of a plugin--no messing with the core code. Check out the links at the end of my blog post for a sample custom content type that can get you started and feel free to ping me if you have any questions!

Collaboration and management are really different things. Personally, I would not look to (or encourage) a one-tool-fits-all approach. We have separate systems; when we need to link to managed content, Jive has the features to do that.

Document management tools (Alfresco, Sharepoint, etc.) are, by their very nature, structured control systems to ensure that official copies of documents are well managed and changes are traceable. Concentric circles of security, business process and authority to read or change are built around these documents, according to their imporance to the business. If that's the requirement, an organization should deploy that sort of tool. In some places, enterpriseses need managed content. Legal stuff. Corporate policy. How to get reimbursed for taxi fares. The dress code, for those that have one.

Collaboration tools - open discussion forums, wikis and other 'consumer managed' content tools are designed to break down those walls and are inherently at odds with the concepts that drive managed content. Their success depends upon relenquishing control and just letting the kids play. The notion of 'control' is a public, community thing. Dependent upon the size, nature and structure of a company, these two concepts can co-exist.

As described by a previous poster, document management systems, such as Documentum or Sharepoint, are for corporate documents that require versioning, change control, and security.

We also need file sharing in Social Networking applications, beyond pictures and videos, so that members in the community can share business documents, such as presentations for the attendees of a conference. In that scenario, less is more regarding features. You don't want versioning or security. The security that governs the community, provided by the social networking application, is sufficient for the document sharing as well. You do want the ability to organize the files in folders (in any number of nested levels, although a few is probably sufficient), and you want the ability to have a few fields to describe the document, title, description, author, and maybe a user-defined field or two. Also, if you have a LOT of documents, the ability to assign tags for search engine purposes would also be helpful.

We use Sharepoint internally to manage corporate documents.

We want to create social communities and be able to share files within the communities.

The fact that a document might be redundant by existing in both places is not an issue to us.

The fact that the document in the community might become out-of-date is not an issue either. If it is important for the document to be kept up-to-date in the community, then the poster of the document should keep it up-to-date. Otherwise, it should be viewed as a point-in-time look at a document that was interesting at the moment.

Agree that documents are useful in (eg) a Jive implementation - they can start as 'discussions', graduate to a separate attached document, and finally be placed into an external document management where things like ISO copy controls can be enacted etc. I disagree that versioning is unnecessary BTW - I think it's most useful when a document is most likely to be changing, which is when it is being collaborated on.

Perhaps the last post on a discussion which produced an "official" document stored elsewhere should include the link to the controlled copy, with a reminder that the document attached to the discussion is not authorised/sanctioned/etc.

For our corporate document needs we use Sohodox, it helps us do tagging, indexing and printing of files. We are quite new to the realm of using document management software and the initial results have been fantastic, cuts down on paper, duplicacy and most importantly makes collaboration much easier.

I am also interested in your approach to integrating your document management system with Jive. Though we're not using Documentum, a high level overview of your solution would be very helpful as we work out a solution of our own. If you're still able to share this information, I would be most appreciative!

Very interested in the interaction here. We have been in internal discussions for over a year on how we handle the large amount of technical content posted on our comunity. We have the suite of Interwoven solutions that we are already using. Looking for anyone that has had experience using Interwoven with a Jive community.

I've been focusing on the ECM industry for about 11 years now with Logica. As a general guideline, the outcome of some collaborations may result in content (not necessarily a document) that an organisation wishes to formally retain and manage within a more traditional document (and records) management system. In this case, the usual scenario is that there is a plug-in for the collaboration solution to 'publish the content into' the document management solution, with options to move or copy the content. Probably along the lines that Documentum mention in the thread above.

It can take a long time (often over a year) for organisations to get a formal file plan, metadata and classification model in place for a document management system, and it is really important to have a consistent method of managing, tagging and 'filing' documents. However, applying the rigid controls on a Collaboration system would stifle it. As such, the plug-in approach from Jive into a ECM is probably the best compromise ... and ideally such plug-ins should increasingly follow the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard.